


The Only Way

by fizzygingr



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 04:03:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6179443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fizzygingr/pseuds/fizzygingr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With the way the season is going, I'm very afraid we're going to end up with Darth Blueberry.</p><p>I'm also afraid that Kanan will be forced to confront him, and to do what Obi-Wan couldn't.</p><p>So this is what happens after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Way

Hera holds him that night and tells him there’s nothing more he could have done. It’s a small comfort, but it’s all she can offer, and so he gratefully accepts it.

“It was the only way,” she whispers, running a hand up and down his back. “It was the only way, it was the only way, it was the only way.”

Kanan knows this. And he knows that they know it. They all watched him carry Ezra’s body on board, marred with every sign of a struggle: blaster holes carefully delivered in non-lethal places. Torn clothes and bruises on both of them. Ezra’s right arm cut off below the elbow, in one final attempt to disable him before delivering the fatal blow. It had been a brutal fight, and nobody blamed Kanan, least of all himself.

Hera knows as well as he does that her words are meaningless, but what can she say? He’d been a kid, a kid with hope in his heart who had entered the fight for the same reason as the rest of them: for the sake of those he loved. They’d all seen how powerful that love was in him. And they’d all seen how equally powerful was the hate.

Only Kanan, though, had reached out and felt it, in a desperate attempt to connect with him, to search the boy’s heart and bring some shred of good to the surface. He’d been met with only rage.

“You didn’t see his eyes, Hera,” he says, reaching out for her hand and grasping it too tightly. She stops talking and begins to stroke the back of his hand with her thumb.

He remembers how Sabine had objected to a burial. “That,” she’d half-shouted, pointing at the body, “that’s not him! The real Ezra, he’s gone; there’s nothing left of him to bury.”

And he wonders if he should have let her go on believing that. That it was a shadow he had fought, a shell. Not the real Ezra, not the bright-eyed kid they’d picked up on Lothal. But he knows it doesn’t work that way. He had reached out and touched Ezra’s presence in the Force, and it had been the same presence. The same love, the same hope, the same light, only now it was twisted and blackened and burned. Ezra hadn’t been replaced by that wild-eyed figure standing before Kanan; he had transformed into him.

He almost wishes that Hera was wrong; that it hadn’t been the only way. It would be more of a comfort to think he had failed, that Ezra hadn’t been so twisted that he was beyond redemption, that someone else could have reached him if given the chance.

He doesn’t want to hear her say it again, and he won’t ask to be lied to. But the silence is becoming unbearable.

“Say something, Hera,” he tells her.

“Like what?”

He shrugs. “Anything.”

So she begins to sing to him, an old Twi’lek lullaby that he’s heard her sing before. Her arms are warm and her voice is soothing, and he sinks more deeply into her presence, fighting with all his will to forget that last glimpse into Ezra’s eyes.


End file.
